New indie publisher Astra Logical just emerged from stealth, led by managing director Heather Jackson, formerly at Amazon Games.
The year I read 20 Hercule Poirot mysteries and fell for Agatha Christie
31.12.2023 - 18:15 / polygon.com / Agatha Christie
For years I’ve enjoyed one-off murder mysteries that friends recommended, but the genre hadn’t really gotten its hooks in me. I’ve simply never been the kind of reader who actively tries to solve the case. My friends who champion these books tend to care deeply about tracking red herrings and attempting to out-sleuth the author. I’m just as content to know whodunit from the very start, as long as the novel itself has enjoyable pacing and character writing.
All this is to say I’ve lived three decades without reading anything by the “queen of mystery” Agatha Christie, despite her being one of the best-selling authors of all time. But after burning through tons of romances this year and looking for other books with brisk pacing and a consistent ending, I gave in. I ended up getting so sucked in that I started a passion project of reading every one of Christie’s Hercule Poirot mysteries in order of publication. It helped me find commonalities in some of my favorite books, shows, and movies, and ultimately led me down a wormhole of so many others. I love to collect hobbies. In 2023, murder mysteries became my latest.
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I started with the books friends most passionately recommended: And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express. They both thrilled me — the former with its macabre and perfectly calibrated deaths, themed to each of the invitees, building and breaking suspense. I understood, immediately, why And Then There Were None is considered one of her best. But Murder on the Orient Express stuck in my mind even longer, specifically because of its bombastic murder reveal at the end — and also because of the detective at the heart of the story, whose illustrious mustaches stole the show. This is, of course, the beloved Belgian mastermind Hercule Poirot.
In Orient Express, I got an immediate sense of his memorably peculiar habits: his need for order, his taste in clothes, and his sense of pomp (that he never owns up to). But I was struck especially by Poirot’s morality; his decision not to turn these people over to the police after having solved the crime, because the victim was himself a heinous murderer. Here was a train quite literally full of murderers, confronted by a master detective, and yet all of them walked away unscathed. Poirot, I immediately understood, was in this for the joy of using his little gray cells to solve the case. Is he in more of her books? I wondered, like a spring chicken. I was immediately rewarded.
Since July, my Libby app has been a long string of Poirot mystery holds. I made a list of the books in order so that I could strike them off with my handy highlighter. 20 books later, my hunger for them has only grown. I’m extremely fond of Poirot’s eccentricities:
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